The Complete Handbook of Butter & Margarine

Chapter 1: Understanding Butter & Margarine

You can't manage what you don't understand. This is the fundamental problem in most professional kitchens and food businesses when it comes to butter and margarine. These are not simply 'fats' that you buy in various shapes. They are engineered or cultured products with distinct chemical structures, and those structures dictate everything: how a croissant cracks, why a pan sauce coats properly, what happens to a biscuit in the freezer, and how much money you spend per week. This chapter pulls back the curtain on the physical and chemical realities. Once you understand the architecture of these fats, the rest of the handbook acts as a decision tree. Without it, you are just guessing.

The Building Blocks: Fat, Water, and Air

Both butter and margarine are water-in-oil emulsions. The phrase is critical because it is the inverse of what it seems. When you mix oil and water, the oil usually forms droplets in the water (an oil-in-water emulsion). But in butter and margarine, it is the water that is dispersed into tiny droplets surrounded by a continuous phase of fat. This is the opposite of what happens in milk or mayonnaise.

In a standard stick of commercial butter, you are looking at roughly 80% milkfat, 16% to 18% water, and about 1% to 2% milk solids other than fat (proteins, minerals, and lactose). Margarine, by contrast, is a blend of vegetable oils and fats, typically about 80% fat, and the rest is water and